In this article I will be discussing four minor plane makers located in Bath, Somerset, about whom very little has previously been known. Strictly speaking only two, John Debank and John Baker, actually made planes; the other two, Stephen Waller and Joseph Swetman, were ironmongers who sold planes bearing their own name, without the name of the man who made them stamped upon the plane.

The photographs here throw a tiny light on an aspect of warfare which is seldom talked about - the support systems for the actual fighting. We are so used to seeing images of men going over the top to their death that it is easy to forget that huge numbers lived and worked behind the lines, building shelter, feeding the troops, laying rail and road ways and transporting materials.

I treat all these old articles, and especially illustrations, with extreme caution. Many of them, if not all, were written and drawn by professional writers and illustrators, not professional tradesmen, turners, in this case.

The David Stanley auction catalogue for the sale in September 2014 included lot 123 described as "A rare pair of 18/19c lathe tools with birch stocks and hand forged irons probably for turning bowls." I thought I had a better idea of what they were and that it was nothing to do with making bowls.

You’re in a tool auction, or an antique shop, and you pick up a saw with the name of a maker you don’t recognise. What might that name signify? Does it imply that behind it lay a firm where the materials, tools, and skilled manpower existed to make saws?

Although eighteenth century woodworking tools survive in surprising numbers, they are mainly found to be specialised types whose slumber in their owners' tool chests was rarely disturbed, like panel-fielding planes, moulders, or gouges. Everyday tools such as hand saws, hones and mallets are rarities, simply because they wore out.

Probably invented in the 16th century, the carpenter's rule was a device to help a man who could not multiply to find the area or the volume of his timber. In its original form, it gave at a glance either the length to make a square foot of a board of given width, or the length to make a cubic foot of a piece of square (or equivalent square) cross-section.